Humans Are Elephants, Not Tigers

Source: Dan Sudermann/Pixabay

Mary-Frances O’Connor has followed up her excellent book The Grieving Brain with The Grieving Body. In it, she writes about how our systems sync with, entrain, and regulate those of our loved ones—and they ours. Our diurnal rhythms rely on various inputs, called “zeitgebers,” or time givers, to keep them on 24-hour cycles. One zeitgeber is social, such as loved ones. The social zeitgeber entrains us to each other and to the natural world. Death rips away this zeitgeber, leading to dysregulation with fatigue, restlessness, and loss of appetite and sleep.

Absence reveals the social zeitgeber’s regulatory role in our daily functioning.

In my book, Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me, I titled a chapter “Humans Aren’t Tigers But Elephants”—for we cannot exist independently of each other. We are biologically social; abandonment and isolation after brain injury can have dire consequences. I excerpt here one frightening consequence.

Terror and Erebus

Inky early morning light weaved through my eyelids Friday morning. My senses sent me incomprehensible information. My tongue was confined. I lifted my hand. My left cheek was swollen. I ran my tongue along too-smooth flesh. I whipped off the sheet in brain-injured slow motion. My feet painfully met the floor. I hobbled to the bathroom, my hips and legs protesting, my back straightening slowly. I flipped on the switch. Edema distorted my left under-eye, my left cheek, my lips, my face into a horror-movie monster. Where it had been swollen on the right the day before was now bruised. Red dots decorated my stretched face.…I stared and stared at the glottis at the back of my throat. Back in the twentieth century, an allergist had instructed me that if it’s bigger, I’m having an allergic reaction. My glottis was OK.

The inside of my mouth was not.

The inside of my left cheek swelled and swelled.

The red lakes with lines of white rough skin here and there in the flatter patches flooded down my neck onto my chest. Long elliptical patches clung to my forearms. I pulled down the collar of my PJs to stop it irritating my neck and growing the red lakes.…

I grabbed the Reactine. I took one.

What to do? What to do? What if my cheek kept swelling? What if my other one started up? I stared inside my mouth. Edema, edema, everywhere….

I was not going to sit in the ER alone.…

The nurse took my vitals and asked me questions. My heart rate was 137, and my blood pressure 140/80. She took my temperature with an ear thermometer. It was the first time I’d seen one. Neat! 37.5°C.

Is that all? I thought. I felt like oil was boiling inside me. She took it again. 36.4.

I said I was bloated. She thought I meant my stomach. My vocabulary failed me, but eventually by looking inside my mouth she understood.

She left, and a neighbour and I faced each other in the enclosed space. I saw her controlled horror as she watched little red patches with erratic edges appear and disappear like lava bubbles around my right lips and cheek, and I knew: skin cells turned red, the red spread, the red swelled up into small patches. The red disappeared and reappeared in another set of skin cells, like some sort of roaming alien infection.

I tried to joke about it. I wanted to allay her fear and maybe allay mine….

No allergy!

The resident agreed. The symptoms were atypical.

The brain injury was killing me.

The myth of the individual was killing me. Erebus, chaos in my brain, had strangled me. Terror had engulfed me.

I was going to die.

The ER professionals didn’t know what to do….

I could die in front of them while they wandered the halls looking for clues, not understanding, not accepting that this was my injured brain giving up on regulating my body. Not hearing me that the worst time was always the early morning. By the time any doctor saw me, it was a time of day where the edema shrank, the rash gone. But they had to do something! Now!

They gave me 50 mg Prednisone.

Humans Aren’t Tigers but Elephants

Saturday, January 6, 2007….I was still alive.

I looked in the mirror. Water swelled the delicate tissue under my left eye. My flailing brain had punched me. I iced it. I spread melaleuca cream on it. My brain found another spot on the right side of my nose to scream its exhaustion. I ate breakfast and swallowed my Prednisone. My energy fled, weakening my legs and wasting me like I had been after my injury. Only recently had I been able to eat breakfast and not need a nap after.

Traumatic Brain Injury Essential Reads

The Impact of Head Injury on Brain Health

Traumatic Brain Injuries in the Modern Age

Now back to post-crash, endless zonked.

My GP called me back from a party. His answering service had failed to deliver my Friday message. He said that he would have given Prednisone differently. He would’ve given first a huge dose then taper off. But he said that he wasn’t going to interfere.

Great, I thought, as I hung up. Now what? I’m having it given all wrong. Would it work? Make me worse? I thought back to the doctor I’d seen years after that day in 1981 in the ER, who’d diagnosed why I’d collapsed on a rainy hot day only a month after my grandmother had died. Her complex testing revealed that not only did I not produce enough adrenaline and norepinephrine under normal circumstances, they didn’t rise under stress. That’s why, when I was stressed, my blood pressure dropped like a stone in a still pool.

But that was before my brain injury.

My blood pressure had instantly risen at the crash site. It had taken me all these years to remember why normal numbers were wrong for me.

I wished that physician was still alive to advise me.

Copyright ©2017 and 2025 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy